Friday, not the thirteenth

A second good joke in the same week as the green bananas quip -- by the way, what sort of bananas did Ocado deliver on Thursday? -- the greenest green bananas I have ever seen from Waitrose's new Fairtrade Home Ripening line of bananas. They are mostly yellow now, so we have nearly survived this bunch. And now another banana line to keep straight when I am placing my on-line order for groceries.

The second joke: Friday is considered an unlucky day in the maritime trade. One merchant decided to prove this superstition wrong. He ordered a new wooden sailing ship to be built, on a Friday; construction of all the important parts of the vessel were begun on Fridays; the boat was christened on a Friday; and sailed off on its first voyage on a Friday.......and it and its cargo of woodpeckers was never seen again.

All right, it sounded much better when told by the magnificent June Tabor in her dramatic deep voice at the Queen Elizabeth Hall last night. Another spellbinding evening of music from June with last night's programme all connected to the sea in one way or another including a wonderful description of the Aberdeen Fish Market from one of H.V. Morton's 1920s travel books on Britain. I was once a huge fan of Morton. Our first trip to Rome, way back when we lived in Hingham, was planned around a Morton book I found in the Hingham Library. Despite being decades old, the essence of Rome had not changed, and we explored sites that a modern day Fodor's or Frommer's or Rough Guide would not have sent us to. When I moved to London and found that Morton had produced a huge list of British travel books, I was excited -- until I started noting the anti-semitic, racist comments laced through their texts. I imagine the Rome of 1957 had few undesirables for him to comment on in that book. I'm not a big Wagner fan, so I have never had to deal with that moral question. Bob is uncomfortable with being a fan of T.S. Eliot since Anthony Julius's book was published in the mid-1990s. We were in Hingham, and much of the book dealt with Eliot's time at nearby Milton Academy (where we might have sent Susan for high school) and Harvard, so the book made a big splash in Boston. I've noticed when Bob says something complimentary about Eliot he likes to add a tag line, "but of course he was an anti-semite..." I have deliberately had nothing to do with Morton in years. I had bought only one Morton book (he's more of a library kind of guy) on Wales, which I left shrink-wrapped for several years, while I evaded dealing with my conscience, and then binned after a biography of the man was published and learned from the reviews that anti-semitism was only the start of this appalling man's sins: he supported Hitler and took South African citizenship as a fan of apartheid. But he was a brilliant travel writer. Last night, sitting in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, we were all transported to Aberdeen's fish market, where the slap of dead fish -- dead being the normal state of fish for people, if not for fish -- sounds like the slap of a million babies bottoms all at once, to paraphrase a bit. Morton's warped mind has not seemed to be an issue for others. The BBC has done a recent TV series following his travels, his books have been reissued (I don't know if the new editions have been redacted.), and through Google, I can join a Morton appreciation society to share views with other Morton fans -- I certainly hope this is referring to his views on travel. So I exude a deep sigh of sadness and wonder how someone with a gift for describing places so well, could do so with a mind steeped in malice.

Back to the subject of Friday, here, yesterday -- It was certainly not an unlucky day in this family. Susan was appointed Curator of the Hampstead Museum at Burgh House. A day we have awaited with no certainty since last March when our former curator announced her resignation and recommended Susan be considered for the job. Five years out of Bowdoin, two years out of Cambridge, Susan has achieved a goal -- a real job in a museum. That may not seem like such a difficult goal to reach, but in the three to four years since Susan decided that a career in museum work was what she wanted to pursue, we have all learned museum work is one of the hardest, most competitive, limited job areas to break into despite the huge number of museums in the UK. She has volunteered at museums -- no longer a route to being hired for jobs as it once was -- worked on grant-funded projects at Hampstead Museum, and financed her independent life by working in a shop. For much of the past two years working -- for pay or as a volunteer -- seven days a week. Of course museum work is still under-paid and under-funded. The curator job is half time with half-pay to match, but she is finally on her way upwards. And we all say hurrah!

09.09.09

Midweek is a good time for a catch-up on events. The weekly gathering of the Flying Geese Quilters met here on Monday. Over the past few years, knitting has been talked about and worked on as much as quilting among the members. The group changes constantly as ex-pats come and go. We have lost most of our serious quilters, and not added anyone with advanced skills and an eye on the greater quilting world. In two weeks, we are having a special reunion meeting, with the three former members -- well lets say three members who no longer live in London, because membership is surely for life -- who best fit that description.

Bob is looking for a new group to sing with. He lost patience with the basses in his last group who never learned the music and were difficult to sing among when they were so unprepared. Last evening he raked through websites of the dozens and dozens and dozens of amateur singing groups in London looking for one that fits his criteria.

Susan is madly busy putting the finishing touches on her first exhibit at the Hampstead Museum commemorating the 30th Anniversary of the formation of the Burgh House Trust taking on the management of Burgh House and opening it to the public as a community centre. The celebration is on Sunday. And I have to get busy on putting together the spiel for my part: a 20 minute tour of Burgh House mid-afternoon, perhaps to become a semi-regular event for visiting groups. She wants me to take on the role of leader of the Friends, but that cannot be considered until -- or perhaps if -- she is offered the job as curator. September offers lots of other voluntary activities. I have already expressed interest in the Hampstead Churchyard Project, and yesterday I saw a sign at Keats House for an open day for volunteers later in the month.

Megan's blog Sanctimommy goes from strength to strength. Her recent post on the Cushing Academy Library shedding its books, and her post on the frightening new cycle-of-life (no longer related to Shakespeare's Seven Ages) we are offering our children are just brilliant reads. Bob's Bazzfazz blog has been picked up by Scholars and Rogues, and he has been linking to her non-mommy posts to widen her readership a bit. Bibs begins pre-school this week -- not a moment too soon for Megan -- the terrible twos have been taking hold, I gather. Bobs is such an adorable baby boy in his pictures. Megan says people melt when he flashes his big smile.

I am building the blog page here with some "gadgets" as Blogger calls them. I have added the Family Blog list. The "Books I am Reading" has gained a companion of "Books I have Read" since I have finally finished the books on the initial list. One lesson of the past week is that if you spend enough time on the computer, there is no time to do anything to write about. September begins a new year for the two book groups to which I belong. Both are run by the same wonderful woman who moved to London from Minnesota as a newlywed with her Australian husband 40 years ago, with the intention of staying for a year or two as an adventure. I have never read so much as I have since moving to London. Bookstores have always been a destination for our family. Bob is a huge reader and book buyer. I have always bought way too many cookbooks and craft books and history books, but when I moved to London I started buying fiction too. I was confused by the authors on offer being so different from those in the States, and after the huge bazaar of the Hingham Public Library, our tiny neighbourhood library seemed much too limited. After a year or so, I did become a huge fan of our library, tiny as it is. It is a lovely building with a coloured glass domed ceiling attached to the Keats House. The library's ginger cat, Domino, died earlier this year, and that was a great loss. It was very soothing to see him curled up sleeping on the sofa.

I don't imagine I am the only person who buys books with the good intention of reading them all, however somehow the books pile up faster than the time expands. By this time two years ago, my pile was enormously tall. The Book Pile Project was a New Year's Resolution of 2008 -- I sorted through the pile, admitted there were some bad purchases that I would never read, and they went to Oxfam -- and resolved to work my way from top to bottom over the year. I actually did stick to my resolution and read a good half of the original stack, but it's impossible to get through a year limiting reading to older purchases -- the monthly book club choices, the new bestsellers, the book sale bargains, and the hot recommendations all must be figured into the calculus. So 2009 began with a pile too -- a much smaller pile and not all the same books -- and The Book Pile Project continues into another year. I am very pleased with my progress this year. The Summer Book and March, which I have just started, are both from The Pile. Tove Jansson is a Finnish writer best known for the beloved Moomin books and cartoons. The Summer Book is an evocative series of vignettes about a motherless girl and her ailing grandmother who spend summer holidays on an island in the Gulf of Finland. A cult classic no doubt, but I found it a bit twee. The descriptions of nature were elegant, but the people of the story never rose above the level of stock characters mouthing banalities to each other. Kate Atkinson's Case Histories has turned into a much admired mystery series because of her appealing hero Jackson Brodie, the last good man standing. I just borrowed the second Brodie book from the library when I returned Janet Evanovich's Finger Lickin' Fifteen. I have read and laughed my way through all fifteen of the Stephanie Plum numbered novels -- what's not to like in a book that spoofs New Jersey -- and one of the books even has a car chase over the Raritan Avenue Bridge into Highland Park and up River Road, a route that took seven years of my life -- and takes about three hours to finish. This is the first one I felt perhaps that Stephanie and her posse of friends and family have been there and done that maybe once too often for the schtick to still be as funny as it was the first fourteen times.

I have my next few books laid out from The Pile, the library, for book club, and I'm very excited about a new food book that arrived from Amazon today. I saw it referenced on the 101 Cookbooks blog yesterday, and I can't believe I already have it in hand. I will report on the reading I get through next week.